Ask a room of business owners where their customers spend time online and most will say Facebook or Google. Few say YouTube, and yet it is on the TV in the living room, the phone in the truck and the tablet in the kitchen, in nearly every household you want to reach. For a local service business it is one of the cheapest ways to be seen by the right people, and one of the most ignored.
What makes it different
On Google search, you pay for someone who is already looking. On YouTube, you reach people before they look, while they are watching a how-to video, a hockey highlight or the news. The ad plays before or during what they chose to watch. For most formats, you only pay if they watch past the first few seconds or click, so the people who skip cost you nothing.
That changes the job of the ad. The first five seconds have to earn the next twenty.
Targeting that actually works locally
The mistake is to target everyone within fifty kilometres. The better approach:
- A tight radius around where you actually work, by postal code if the platform allows it.
- People who recently searched for your service on Google. YouTube can use Google search history, so you can show your ad to someone who looked up "furnace repair Hamilton" last week.
- People watching videos about your category: home renovation, DIY repairs, real estate, whatever sits next to what you do.
- Your own retargeting list: site visitors and past video viewers.
Combine the radius with any one of the others and the audience gets small, relevant and cheap.
What to put in the first five seconds
Start in the middle of the job. Say the town. Say the problem. "If your furnace in Burlington quit this week, here's what's probably wrong." A real technician, a real basement, a real voice. The polished brand video with a drone shot of the city skyline is what people skip; the plain one that sounds like a neighbour is what they watch.
Keep the whole thing under thirty seconds for the skippable format, with the phone number or business name on screen the whole time, because a lot of people will watch without sound.
What to measure
Not views. Views are cheap and they flatter. Measure the lift in branded searches (people typing your business name into Google after seeing the ad), calls from the retargeting ads that follow the video, and whether your cost per lead on search goes down as more people recognize the name. Those are the numbers that tell you YouTube is working.
Where it fits
For most of our clients YouTube is the awareness layer of the social and display plan: short video gets you seen, retargeting keeps you familiar, and search catches the call. It is rarely the channel that gets credit for the lead, and it is often the reason the lead happened.